


In Like A Soft Bullet

by Mrinalinee



Category: Being Human (UK), Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Isolation, loss of free will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-29
Updated: 2011-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-06 20:02:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mrinalinee/pseuds/Mrinalinee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie and Jo meet in the middle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Like A Soft Bullet

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place post Being Human S2 and "Abandon All Hope."
> 
> Title is from "Half-Hanged Mary" by Margaret Atwood.

It's a waiting room, after all. The chairs are sharp, edgy, maximizing discomfort; there is no visible light source, but the walls are white as white. When you scuff your boots on the linoleum floor with the highest unpleasant sound, no traces remain. There is one television in one corner, with only a flickering snow and a shrieking sort of smooth jazz emanating. You press your thighs against the broken wood. You are sitting and waiting as if for the worst news you have ever received, and you are wishing for the floor and something sharp.

 

You try to make the best of things.

“Well,” you say, to the blank faces lined up beside you. “This isn't so bad, is it?”

You say, “You must get all sorts in here. Have you seen my friend Gilbert? Has he been by lately? Have you seen my friend - ?” 

You say, “They can't keep us here forever, can they?”

But gathering in you is the awful conclusion that they can, they will, there isn't any they to keep you in, no one to let you out.

 

Sometimes the faces change around you, but you can never be certain when it happens; no one gets up to leave; the door never opens.

 

You begin to obsessively refine your plans for escape; but you can barely move for shaking, barely move beyond the shaking, and you wind and wind until finally you spring. You yell; you throw your chair across the room; you kick the walls. You have not been so uncontrolled since you were a poltergeist.

On the television is the image of Nina and George and Mitchell, about to be hurt, about to die, and you don't think; you throw your chair at the television, and there you are, grabbing Kemp and pulling him back in, and you are saying, “Can you hear me?” and hearing George and Mitchell through the broken television set, and eventually you are back dead in the middle of the room, dead silence.

“This is fear you're feeling,” says the man who sits next to you when you are sitting.

The need for speaking is so great, and so lost to you, that immediately the anger flies away from you, even for this man and his self-evidence. 

“This is fear,” he says. “Label it. Recognize it. If you can, you can take the moment to control it.” His face shifts around the words, but even you, so intent on it, cannot track its movement.

“Of course I'm bloody fucking damn well afraid,” you shout, but you are not much of a shouter, and it comes out as an exceptionally loud indoor voice. This is fear, you tell yourself without meaning or wanting to: fear and not anger. “Aren't you?”

“No,” says the man, returning to his serene contemplation of the door; and knowing, without meaning or wanting to, that he hasn't got anything more to say to you, you slump back in your chair, returned soundlessly and invisible to its place against the wall.

He does not speak to you again. No one does. 

 

When the door opens for the first time, swinging towards you, you are sitting watching the jellying reflections of your knees on the floor, and you cannot see inside. You imagine white rubber gloves.

The voice on the other side says, “Annie Sawyer,” not a question.

 

But you do not find them in the next room, empty but for the door in front of you, cracked open. You hear laughter and voices, pressing behind you from the room you abandoned. 

Before you turn to go out the way you came and find the wall doorless, flat and unsplit, you imagine the white gloves marking charts, “Violent: Needs Containment.”

You turn. You find the wall without a door. You push against the wall, scratching it as if your nails might make an opening appear there, thumping with the flat of your hands. “Hello?” you shout, and, desperate, “Please.”

You move across the room towards the open door, but before you reach halfway, a terror clutches your heart, greater than your earlier fear, and you snap yourself back against the treacherous wall, edging your way along it to the hinge side of the door, until you are just close enough to brush it closed with your fingertips. You can count every noise in the room, and that is: none, beyond the ticking sound of a distant clock. 

When you have nerved yourself to look again at the door, you find you don't have to; you know already that it has swung open again.

 

You can hear yourself blink, and you dread the opening of your eyes for the certainty it brings that you are in a different room, although you know nothing has changed.

You cannot stay here. You think of George and Nina and Mitchell, and how you were taken away from them, until you cannot concentrate on anything but your fear and rage, and these you bank into a quiet but enormous trembling anger.

Every time you feel that you are getting close to forcing a way out with your hazy ghostly powers, your concentration skips and you are faced with the image of a redeyed staring girl, but you are returned to yourself and your buzzing white room before you can ask who she is or how she got there.

 

You stick your head through the door, once, but it's only darkness beyond, a perfect cube of darkness starting at the parting between the rooms: the kind of darkness that immediately follows the cessation of light but that no amount of blinking can correct. You close the door, just for the act of closing.

 

But you have no way way to determine how much time has passed, and this both terrifies you and gives you another lens through which you resolve your anger. You build it and build, and then you push it out against the walls, and you are in a different closed room, and the girl has a knife at your throat, and she says, “Gotcha.”

\---

When you materialised at knife-point, you let out such a shriek, a shriek to rival the highest-pitched of George's, but now you two are sitting at opposite ends of the room, watching each other: hers wary and brazen, yours terrified and sideways. You have nothing to be afraid of except: you are not home. You have nothing not to be afraid of.

“I'm Annie,” you offer.

“Yeah.” She looks down, deliberate, and tests the knife point on the floor. You know by now to expect no scratch on the hard white surface, and there is none.

“Haven't you got a name?” your nervousness bubbling over. “Or do you not remember it. It's alright if you don't.”

Silence, which you don't need for encouragement. You wade in.

“I always think we should start these things like: I'm Annie. I was twenty-two years old.” You wait. “I lived in Bristol. Then my idiot fiance pushed me down the stairs and here I am.” You think about it. “Well, some things happened after that, but I don't think you'd believe them.”

“Jo,” she says, and you almost start up delighted but - “I don't trust you.”

“Well, I - .” You flounder. “You have the knife.”

“True,” she says and tests it again, this time on her thumb. You notice the thin splatter of her blood. You notice that you are not breathing, the way you sometimes used to around George (and then Nina), and it makes you feel as you did then, flat and brittle.

\---

Jo's room is almost identical to your own, six white sides like the inside of a box, a clocklike noise of unknown origin, a paneled white door that looks like it belongs in a washroom. You are shamefully, secretly glad that in Jo's, the door is always closed.

\---

You say, “I didn't see you in my room, that looked like a waiting room.”

“I didn't see you in mine.”

“Well that's good then! Neither of us are blind or seeing things.” You wink, exaggerated, and then wonder why you did. Of course Americans have their own waiting room.

“Or we both are,” she says unhelpfully.

“Wonder why it took so long, if there's more than one or two,” she adds, and you imagine her clawing the walls as you did, and admire the blandness of her voice.

“Lots of ghosts maybe.”

“The apocalypse,” she says.

“The apocalypse?” She just looks at you, and you let it go, for the moment. You worry about George and Mitchell. You wonder how long she's been here.

“When you came in, you know? From the waiting room. Did you hear them laughing? Behind you? I, erm. I heard them laughing.”

“I saw them,” says Jo. “The voice came over the loudspeaker, okay, and when I opened the door, they were there, but -. They were walking away. I followed them. I knew if I - . I knew I could find my mom if I caught them. I followed them through like six rooms and I finally reached this one. And - .”

“Motherfuckers,” you burst out, and her face lifts briefly. You notice again the door, scarred with the marks of her knife, white all the way through.

“It'll be alright,” you say. “I have friends -. We'll get out of here.”

“Yeah,” she says. 

“So how'd you get in here anyway,” she asks, and you're not sure if that means she trusts you or that she doesn't.

“Oh I just -” you say.

“Just what?”

“I'm not sure,” you say.

\---

She flips her knife over her wrist and down again, to the floor; this is how she passes the time while you grate your nails against the floor and count the beats between each clock strike. One then six then two in immediate succession, then a pause so long you almost miss the next tick. Worst, you know, is that when you talk, and forget to pay attention, it seems right and normal, normal background noise.

“Did you have a good life?” you say at first, a little wistful. “Were you happy?”

“Why should I tell you that?” she says, as if reflexively. 

“What do you think I'm going to do with the information?” You spread your hands, conscious of the performed quality of the movement. “If I were working for the enemy, don't you think I'd know? I bet they have huge long files on us.”

“I don't think you're working for the enemy,” she says, helpless. “I just don't - . I don't know what to -. Yeah. I had a good life. Really good.”

You think about your life. “Me too,” you say.

\---

“Oh, do you think they're watching us?” you say. “We should do something. Make faces for the camera.”

“There's no camera.” You frown. “There isn't. But they're definitely watching us.” You don't understand how she can be so calm about it. “I don't know. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about, like, your killer rock collection.”

“Let me tell you about my friends,” you start. “There was George and Mitchell, and then there was Nina, who was lovely, and needed a friend other than George because George was great but he was going through a difficult time -”

“You realize I don't know any of these people, right?” she interrupts.

“That's why I'm telling you about them. You wanted to know, so now you have to listen.”

And, surprisingly, she does.

 

When she closes her eyes too long, you know she is thinking of her mum, the same way you think of yours, and wonder what's become of her without you. At these times you think of the long lonely months before George and Mitchell cluttered into the house you'd meant to share with them, maybe forever, and the memory digs into you like pins.

You elbow her and say, “Rise and shine!”

 

Ash came to the Roadhouse by accident; he wandered in one day like it was inevitable and just forgot to leave, building up a mess and a computer around him until it was built into the mess of the Roadhouse. 

You close your eyes and try to crowd out the walls behind them with the memories of her life, the petrol pumps and trucks and shotguns, the images that stick. She talks over you for a while, and finally nudges you, returning you to your vision, blotchless and unblurred, your restless, shiftless room.

“You awake?”

“If I was sleeping, it was only to dream of you,” you say. “Oh no. Not that.” You open your eyes very wide. “I'm listening.”

And you are, too. 

 

You never think anymore that she could be lying, and you are beginning to believe that she feels the same way. No one could lie so richly and for so long, you reason; and of course you already know about the existence of werewolves and vampires and ghosts. You kicked around it for a while, but it kept edging through, and finally you let it. It was you; you said, “Mitchell is a vampire, alright? And George a werewolf,” and she said, “What the fuck,” staring. 

“I couldn't not tell you,” you said, with your hands. “I know it -”

And she said, “You _lived_ with a vampire? Are you shitting me?” and it turned out American vampires even looked different.

( _Try me_ , she had said.)

\---

And at first you hated her for what she did to people like you – and she, you imagined, hated you for being people like you – but you can never forget the slow mad ache of aloneness in your own home, imagine Mitchell fanged and black-eyed and George chasing chickens in the forest, and you know how someone could do the things she says without someone else there to pull them down. But your conversation is nevertheless a hesitant, skipping thing; there are times you cannot talk to her at all; and in the silence there, all you think about is how you laughed at the jokes of strangers who couldn't see or hear you in the months before George and Mitchell came, and all you hear is her huffing breaths, and the snick-snick-snick of her knife in time with the arrhythmic tick of the unseen clock.

Even in these times, she is the only thing between the walls and you, terrified you, in your jumper and garrulousness, and wide-awake openness. In the face of her silences, you are diminished like flat Coke. 

 

“My house was pink,” you say. “Really an awful pink.”

“Like Pepto Bismol,” she says.

You think. “Like an elephant,” you say. Her sudden, sharp smile reflects the walls (the walls).

 

You remember that you hid from them for days, not wanting to see them see through you, and that George screamed when he saw you, but it was Mitchell who dropped the dishes.

But you cannot remember how you hid then, and wonder if you could remember even if you weren't as you are now, out in the open, splayed upon the walls. 

 

You are an echoing thing made of memories, the memories of a person. You are blown like leaves without a house to hold you. You are the passive voice, waiting. You are, you are. 

 

If being dead means that you can never drink tea again, or hug someone and really feel it, down to the compression of your body, or put up a blanket fort against the cold (although you and Mitchell will give it your best shot), then at least you ought to be free of all of inconveniences associated with having a living body. And you did, for a long time, but here you feel the floor in every movement, the stagnant pressure in your unliving body. You know you are not sitting right. A hectic flush prickles up and down your skin, hot and cold.

Jo sighs, and shifts her weight.

“You feel it too?” you say, and when she looks up, “Was it good for you? Oh, again. I'm sorry. Again.”

“Not as good as it's going to be for you.” She sighs again. “This place is a fucking shithole.”

“Worse than the flat I lived with my first boyfriend,” you say. “And that had rats. And fleas, I'm sure of it.” 

She glares, as fully as you can do anything here, except rage. “If we start having fleas, I'm going to - “ She stops.

“What are you going to do? Tough guy?”

She frowns at the floor. “I'm going to be pissed.” You don't want her to be pissed at you. Even worse - “I'm not going to talk to you.” She's laughing a little now. “This place turns us into twelve year olds, Jesus.”

It's your turn to glare. “I was much cleverer than that at twelve.”

“You regressed from there, huh?” Yet a third sigh, theatrical. “Me too.”

 

You don't sleep; neither of you do. But it isn't the gentle sleeplessness of your old home; you become dry and wide; your fingers shake. She paces, as you used to, but with intent, searching for weaknesses; now you draw further to yourself, and can barely move at all. 

“Don't be afraid,” she says.

“I'm not afraid,” you say. “I'm fearless.”

She laughs, and you feign hurt. “So that screaming when we met, that was just for show.”

“I'm a method actor. Of course. Can't you tell?”

 

If Owen came to you and kissed you with a mouth that was calm and smiling, if he reached up into your hair and threw you down, the floor would be white like this. 

 

You used to think that if people could break at all, it's at once; but you've long since learned that the breakings of people are small and constant, twiglike fractures; and this is what you witness with Jo, and with yourself. Sometimes she grumbles, and prowls, and hacks determinedly at the walls, which heal themselves wherever they give, and sometimes she shouts and throws herself at them, while you pull closer and closer to yourself. Only once does she come to you crying, and says what you've always said to each other - _we'll get out of here_.

“Of course we will,” you say and immediately curse yourself for sounding too cheerful.

“Of course,” she says.

\---

“Do you need my help?” she asks.

You feel her horror and pain, the shape and size of it, and say, “Yeah. I mean yes. I do.” You grab her hand and try not to wonder whether or not you will end up in America, or somewhere else, or how you will ever find George and Mitchell again. You try not think that you might have got comfortable here; you know you haven't.

“I just need to find someone real quick and we'll get out of here.” Her thumb rubs the line of your hand. “It's gonna be okay. Okay. Okay, what do you need me to do?”

You explain, and she says, “God. This is so fucked up,” and smiles. “It's gonna be okay.”

“It will,” you say, to your hands joined on the floor.

\---

You are sitting with your knees gathered into your chest, one palm flat on the floor. The room is bright and unquiet but you cast no shadow. One the walls, dark shapes are shivering, shifting. You hear their voices moving behind the walls, coming closer. 


End file.
